I didn’t cry for Hugo, over the next few days. This felt shameful, a spit in the face of everything he had done and yet another marker of just how fucked up I was, but I couldn’t do it. I actually tried—put on his favorite Leonard Cohen album, broke open a leftover bottle of wine and thought about everything he had lost, the fact that I would never see him again, all of it—but nothing happened. His absence was enormous and tangible, as if a part of the house was gone, and yet on an emotional level his death didn’t seem to exist.
My mother had been right about the detectives only keeping their mouths shut through the funeral. Two days later it was all over the news websites, via a neatly worded press release: Hugo Hennessy, the man in whose garden the remains of eighteen-year-old Dominic Ganly had recently been found, had died of natural causes; detectives were not pursuing any other lines of inquiry in connection with the case. The websites padded this out with lavish bumph about Dominic’s rugby achievements, generic quotes from classmates, and whatever info on Hugo they could scrounge up, some bits more accurate than others. One website had misheard and had Hugo down as a gynecologist, which led to frenzied hysteria in the comments section when someone wondered if he had been performing kitchen-table abortions and Dominic had threatened to report him after Hugo operated on his girlfriend. Within hours this had turned into fact, to the point where even a correction from the website didn’t change people’s minds (So what it doesn’t take a Dr.!!! And we already no he was a murderer not much of a stretch 2 think he wd murder babies as well! He got off 2 litely shd be rotting in jail and a bunch of angry red emojis). The other comments sections weren’t much better (“Oh, God, comments sections,” Susanna said; “cesspits. Never read them”): the general consensus seemed to be that it was deeply suspicious that Hugo had never married, and that he had murdered Dominic after Dominic rejected his advances.
I thought a lot about what my father had said, that week. Back in the hospital I had been convinced that I needed a plan, either to protect myself or to turn myself in and make some kind of deal, but now I couldn’t remember why. The thing about not pursuing other lines of inquiry: that might have been thrown out there to lull me into a false sense of security, but either way, it didn’t seem like there was a lot Rafferty could do to me. Even if he found some hard evidence, surely a confession from someone else would count as reasonable doubt? And it didn’t seem like handing myself in would make the world a better place in any way. On the contrary: the situation was hard enough on my family as it was, I couldn’t even imagine what it would do to my parents if I went to prison for murder. The reason I had been considering it to begin with had never been out of some noble urge to sacrifice myself on the altar of justice, anyway. Partly it had been because of Hugo—only a total shit would have let him spend his last couple of months in jail; but letting a bunch of internet douchebags spin bullshit that he would never see was a completely different thing. And, like my dad had said, Hugo had chosen this. His mind had been eroding, but not to the point where he didn’t know what he was doing. He had done this deliberately, and he had done it to protect me. Throwing that away would have felt like a really impressive level of ingratitude.
The other reason I had been considering turning myself in had been because why not? What was left to protect? Even when most other stuff had gone by the wayside, I had hung on to the idea that at least I was a decent guy, one of the good guys, but the overwhelming likelihood that I was a murderer put a fairly big damper on that. But it was surprising how fast I had got used to the idea. Not that I liked it. I had never had fantasies of being a badass dangerous outlaw; basically, all I had ever wanted to be was normal and happy. But with that off the table, and once the initial shock had worn off, badass outlaw at least felt better than contemptible useless fucked-up victim. In a weird way, it actually went a step or two towards canceling out the victim thing; it made the fact that I had let two scumbag skangers kick my ass a little more palatable. At least somewhere along the way I had, apparently, done some ass-kicking of my own.
All of which was to say that I wasn’t going to be handing myself in to the cops. Rafferty could go fuck himself. I didn’t need a plan; all I needed to do, if by any chance he showed up, was keep my mouth shut.
The big question, the one I hadn’t really thought about up until then, was what I was going to do instead. I couldn’t just drift around the Ivy House for the rest of my life, appealing though that sounded; in fact, there was no reason I should still be there at all. There was my apartment to deal with—I was still paying the mortgage, and my savings weren’t going to last forever—there was work, there were all the things that Hugo had given me an excellent excuse for ignoring. Now Hugo was gone, and there they all were, lined up to jab at me more insistently by the day.
It seemed to me that it came down, in the end, to why I had killed Dominic (if I had, if, sometimes that slipped away from me). I didn’t buy the implausible out that Rafferty had dangled in front of me, the scare gone wrong—if that was all I had had in mind, why not just jump Dominic and throw a few punches, or wave a knife around? Why the baroque hassle of learning how to make a garrote, never mind how to use one? No: that had to have been because I wanted to kill him. And the reason mattered.
I went through it in my head step by step, methodically, pacing back and forth between rooms and talking out loud to myself to make sure I had things straight. If I had done this because Dominic was giving me grief that summer (plausible, given how shitty he had been acting in general) or because of some dumb hormone-fueled bullshit over a girl (who had I even been into, that summer? Jasmine Something but not like I had been madly in love, same for Lara Mulvaney and basically every other remotely attractive girl I knew—I couldn’t believe I would have garroted anyone over any of them, although clearly what I believed meant less than nothing)—if it had been that kind of petty tantrum, then that didn’t seem like something I could just gloss over. Not that I felt the need to do penance by dedicating my life to serving the poor, or anything, but aiming for a pretty white picket fence didn’t seem like an option either. It was the wrong kind of dangerousness—volcanic, unpredictable, horrifying; something that didn’t belong around, say, babies, or Melissa.
If Rafferty was right, on the other hand, and this had happened because I was somehow protecting Leon, then that seemed like an entirely different thing. That felt like someone who would deserve what Hugo had done for him; someone who had the right, or maybe even the responsibility, to reclaim whatever he could of life.
I don’t know how much hope I held out. I had never seen myself as some white knight, either, charging recklessly into battle to save the oppressed, but I did still want to believe that at some level, at least, I had been a decent guy. Leon talked like I was some tremendous douche who had never lifted a finger for anyone except myself, but I had got rid of other bullies for him, after all, I had chased off the wanker who was hassling Melissa, I had stayed here at the Ivy House with Hugo right to the end; surely it wasn’t too much of a stretch to think that, if I had somehow found out the full extent of what Dominic was doing to Leon, I might have been protective?